Hail to the Thief

The geography is genuinely legible if you let your eye follow it. A dark diagonal ridge runs across the upper third, painted in loose, dripping brushstrokes of blue and white with thin black lines bleeding down from it like rain or like the edge of a coastline dissolving. Below that ridge the land begins, and the land is made entirely of text. Curving boulevards of colour sweep from the lower left toward the right, the tiles bending along them so you can almost feel the streets. It is a city seen from above, its blocks and avenues traced not in ink lines but in the collision of a thousand commercial words.

The palette works as a discipline, not an accident, and you can count it: black, white and five colours, reds, oranges, greens, blues and yellows, each word boxed in its own solid field. The restraint is what keeps the chaos readable. Set a green word beside a red one beside a blue one and the eye keeps moving, never resting, exactly the way a bombardment of advertising never lets you rest.

The focal path is engineered. The eye lands first on the big red TV block dead centre, blazing white on red, flanked by COIN and BANGBANG and a defiant 25 cents. From there it gets pulled outward: to FEAR sitting huge in orange near the top right, next to TURN and MAIL and CENTER; to POOR; to VIDEO; to GOD glowing yellow-green above COLOR and SOON. Once it starts wandering it cannot stop.

And the language is aggressive. That menace soaks into every corner, but it shares the surface with smaller human desperations: RETIREMENT, LOSS, BAIL, AIDS, DRUGS, RECOVERY, TROUBLE, LIQUOR, TANNING. The typography does the argument. By boxing every word in its own tile and lettering it by hand, the image flattens fear and commerce and prayer into a single visual grammar, so that a plea and a price tag look identical and equally shrill.

The whole thing reads on two scales at once, which is why it holds. From a distance it is cartography, an aerial view of streets and a shoreline. Up close it dissolves into signage, the isolated words of a place selling and warning and pleading simultaneously. The meaning lives in that oscillation: a portrait of a society that has converted every anxiety into a slogan and every slogan into a product, until the map of a city and the noise of its advertising become the same object. For a picture assembled from words like LUBE, DONUT, HAMBURGER and HAIR, it is a remarkably exact image of manufactured dread, the sound of consumer language turned into a warning it can no longer hear.

The man who built it is Stanley Donwood, the artist who has made every piece of Radiohead's artwork since The Bends in 1995. For this one, he did something closer to fieldwork than to painting. While the band decamped to Los Angeles to record with producer Nigel Godrich, Donwood went with them, working in the same building where they made the music.

He cannot drive, so he rode through the city as a passenger, and instead of watching the road he watched the roadside: the signs, the hoardings, the words and the colours screaming from every storefront and lawn. He noticed how hostile Los Angeles signage could be, how people planted things like ARMED RESPONSE on their own front lawns. He wrote the words and colours down, then cut them up and reassembled them, holding himself to a deliberately limited palette of black, white and five colours.

The finished pieces were not decorative abstractions but stylised maps of cities tied to the so-called war on terror: Manhattan, LA, London, Grozny and Kabul. The front cover is one of those maps.

The words on the cover matter because of who wrote the words inside. Thom Yorke is the member most bound up in Radiohead's visual identity, and he worked closely with Donwood on the imagery. He also wrote these lyrics partly in response to the election of US president George W. Bush, which is what gives the map-of-war-cities concept its charge. Yorke's political unease and Donwood's cut-up street signs are two halves of the same argument.

The album arrived on 9 June 2003, a day later in the United States on 10 June, issued through Parlophone internationally and Capitol in the States, both under the EMI umbrella. Its sound was labelled alternative and art rock, experimental and electronic, restless in the same way the cover is restless.

What began as Donwood scribbling in the passenger seat of a car has outlasted the moment it captured. The artwork he made for Radiohead, this word-map among it, has since been given the museum treatment, shown at the Ashmolean, the street signs of a nervous decade hung up as history.